If White Kids Die: Memories of a Civil Rights Movement Volunteer

by Dick J. Reavis

The summer of 1964 had been “Freedom Summer” for a few campuses. The Student Non-Violent Co-Ordinating Committee (SNCC) had drawn some five hundred students, most of them white, from Ivy League and prestigious universities to help its integration efforts in Mississippi. An up-and-coming leader named Stokely Carmichael had told a group of prospective volunteers in New York that SNCC wanted to be sure that if blacks were killed for the civil rights cause, whites would die with them. What he said was prophetic, even if it wasn’t popular. A few weeks after his speech, three young men—two white and one black—were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The nation was scandalized.

While he wasn’t aware of Carmichael’s strategy when he decided to join a 1965 summer voter registration program, Dick J. Reavis felt it instinctively when he told his resistant father the reason he was going. “Dad, if we live in a country where nobody pays attention when Negroes die, then I guess that’s the way it has to be. Somebody has to pay the price.” The price the white middle-class Texan paid when he spent a summer on the wrong side of the tracks in Demopolis, Alabama, was his innocence.

If White Kids Die describes his gradual maturation as he encountered the other side of legally enforced racism. Harassed by police for being in a white neighborhood with a black coworker, arrested for vagrancy, and prevented from driving by arcane residency laws, Reavis came to understand the frustration with “The System” that fueled the Civil Rights Movement. At the same time, he saw the infighting and strategizing within the Movement that prevented it from living up to his ideals. In the end, he concludes, “The System made some concessions to our protests, but its power was never trumped. . . . But history has not ended, and deep in my heart, I do believe that we—virtually the whole human race—will overcome someday.”

Genres: Nonfiction

128 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2001

Reviews

[Sepideh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was loaned to me by one of its main characters.

This is a memoir by a white Texan who participated in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. I had not really given much consideration to the uniqueness of the role that white Southerners played in The Movement. During this era, some jails were trying to keep the amount of money needed for bail a secret from members of the Civil Rights movement trying to bail out activists so that activists would stay in jail longer. Some of the Southerners supporting groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference could call up the jails with stories about how the activists were needed as farm labor and discover the bail amounts so bail could be posted.

However, sometimes, when these activists used code-switching to keep themselves out of jail, they lost the trust of the people that they were supposedly trying to help. In one scene in the book, the author is driving a car that breaks down, and the police pull up to potentially arrest him and his passenger. The author tries to get himself and his black passenger out of trouble by telling him something to the effect of "Boy, go get some oil" in front of the police officer. The man goes to get the oil but never speaks to the author again.

The author left college at age 19 to help people register to vote in Demopolis, Alabama. Even though he has a girlfriend back at school, the way he seems to lust after black girls between the ages of 14 and 16, you get a sense that his motives are not completely pure.

In Chapter 6, the author is discussing Stokely Carmichael's efforts in the Black Power movement. There are a few pages where he discusses "The System" that Carmichael refers to and how it is not quite Apartheid and how it was not quite what Marx referred to as the capitalist system. It looked like he was struggling to described institutional racism before we had the term "institutional racism," and that was interesting to see.